I

A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever
the worst of fathers. Even as grandfather he is too near, for one
poet can lay a streak of poverty over three generations. Doubt not
I know whereof I speak, dear reader, for my mother's father was a
poet--a French poet, too, whose lines had crossed the Atlantic long
before that summer of 1770 when he came to Montreal. He died
there, leaving only debts and those who had great need of a better
legacy--my mother and grandmother.

As to my father, he had none of that fatal folly in him. He was a
mountaineer of Vermont--a man of steely sinews that took well to
the grip of a sword. He cut his way to fame in the Northern army
when the British came first to give us battle, and a bloody way it
was. I have now a faded letter from Ethan Allen, grim old warrior,
in which he calls my father "the best swordsman that ever straddled
a horse." He was a "gallous chap" in his youth, so said my
grandmother, with a great love of good clothes and gunpowder. He
went to Montreal, as a boy, to be educated; took lessons in
fencing, fought a duel, ran away from school, and came home with
little learning and a wife. Punished by disinheritance, he took a
farm, and left the plough to go into battle.

I wonder often that my mother could put up with the stress and
hardship of his life, for she had had gentle breeding, of which I
knew little until I was grown to manhood, when I came to know also
what a woman will do for the love of her heart. I remember well
those tales of knights and ladies she used to tell me as we sat